Former Yale Employee Faces 44 Years in Prison

Folks living in the northeast in 2009 may recall the horrific murder of Annie Le, a Yale doctoral student whose body was found in a wall of a university lab on the scheduled day of her wedding.

Today, former animal research technician Raymond Clark III was sentenced to 44 years in prison for the killing, the Associated Press reports.

Clark, 26, pleaded guilty in March to strangling the 24-year-old Yale student. Clark also copped to sexual assault under the Alford doctrine, a legal concept likely familiar to all you legal eagles in the crowd.

Under the Alford plea, which strikes us as a strange legal animal, Clark did not agree to the facts of the crime as alleged by prosecutors, AP reports, but he did agree that the state has enough evidence to get a conviction for sexual assault.

Coincidentally, we explored the Alford doctrine in this earlier post about another Yale crime involving Akash Maharaj, a student who pleaded guilty to theft for getting into the college based on an alleged forged transcript and letter of recommendation.

In the Clark case, police discovered Le’s body stuffed behind a wall on Sept. 13, 2009. She had last been seen entering a medical building on Yale’s campus five days prior, the same building where Clark worked and tended to the laboratory animals, according to the arrest warrant affidavit released two months after the murder. A green ink pen found in the building – which contained the perpetrator’s and victim’s DNA – initially linked Clark to the murder, the affidavit states.

Clark addressed the court at today’s sentencing hearing. “Annie was and will always be a wonderful person, by far a better person than I will ever be in my life,” he said, according to AP. “I am sorry I ruined lives and I am sorry for taking Annie Le’s life.”

Le’s mother, Vivian Le, also spoke, AP reports.

“She was about to start her life as a young bride. She told me many times how happy she was to start her family. I will never see her walking down the aisle,” she said.

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